Foreign Correspondent Season 17

February. 17,2009      TV-PG
Rating:
7.7
Trailer Synopsis

Australia's leading international affairs program featuring fascinating, in-depth stories from the ABC's unrivalled network of foreign correspondents.

Episode 42 : Thanks for Watching
November. 10,2009
Foreign Correspondent’s 2009 spins to a close with an inside look at the stories, characters and issues that moved, provoked and enthralled our audience. It’s a fascinating, behind the scenes edition featuring some things we didn’t show you along with updates, insights and candid reflections from some of the team.
Episode 41 : Winds of Change
November. 03,2009
With its giant wind farms and pedal-pushing population, Denmark looks like a model global citizen setting a shining green example for all comers to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Look a little closer though and there are some grubby realities.
Episode 40 : Flight AF 447
October. 27,2009
What brought down Air France flight 447? The families, friends and fellow workers of the 228 people who perished when the Rio-Paris flight ditched in the Atlantic mid-year are all desperate for answers. But with airlines relying on outmoded technology that may never happen.
Episode 39 : Without Honour and Humanity
October. 20,2009
It’s claimed Japan’s ferocious and feared Yakuza murder, extort and intimidate according to an honour code. But where is the honour in the squalid new enterprise now adding to their billion dollar criminal turnover?
Episode 38 : California Burning
October. 13,2009
In California massive wildfires are met with massive force – but it comes with a multimillion dollar price tag. With fires on the increase around the world, is money and manpower the answer or is there a better way?
Episode 37 : Europe or Die Trying
October. 06,2009
Paul Kenyon travels three thousand miles along the most dangerous illegal immigration route out of Africa. Many die crossing the Sahara, or at sea on the way to a better future in Europe - but can the survivors convince those who follow, that Europe in recession is no longer worth the risk?
Episode 36 : Berlusconi and the Beautiful
September. 29,2009
He’s got money to burn, enormous political and personal power, and well, a problem. Beautiful women. Why can’t Silvio Berlusconi behave himself and why do Italians shrug off his sexual escapades and say so what?
Episode 35 : Hook, Line and Sunk!
September. 22,2009
In Iceland, the financial crisis is called the kreppa and a year after it hit, the whole country is still well and truly in it. Thousands are losing their homes, unemployment is ten times higher and Britain is demanding it pay back billions of dollars lost in Icelandic investments.
Episode 34 : Fly Away Children
September. 15,2009
Most African adoptions don’t have a Hollywood ending. A Foreign Correspondent investigation in Ethiopia exposes a booming international adoption trade out of control – mothers duped into surrendering their children and some foreign families unsure if their adopted child was really an orphan after all.
Episode 33 : The Congo Connection
September. 08,2009
Are mobile phones the new blood diamond? Is our insatiable appetite for the latest electronic gadgets actually fuelling despair, deprivation and oppression in another part of the world … even threatening the survival of central Africa’s magnificent gorillas?
Episode 32 : 80 Million a Day
September. 01,2009
It’s a staggering national habit and it’s grown into a juggernaut of a killing machine claiming an annual toll eclipsing the Aceh tsunami. Welcome to the warning-free, smoking free-for-all that’s become Big Tobacco’s big new frontier.
Episode 31 : A Brave Face
August. 25,2009
They’ve been scarred so deeply they’re shockingly disfigured and yet they’ve refused to bow their heads or withdraw from the world. They’re the remarkable women who’ve survived acid attack and who have overcome their injuries to transform their lives.
Episode 30 : Return to the Fatal Sky
August. 18,2009
A year ago Foreign Correspondent flew into the scandalously unsafe skies over PNG to examine why the nation’s aviation industry sustains so many fatal accidents and dangerous incidents then struggles to examine those crashes and near misses and fails to apply stricter safety standards.
Episode 29 : Total Control
August. 11,2009
When Venezuela’s socialist firebrand Hugo Chavez lost his best enemy and saw global capitalism teeter you might think he’d be jumping for joy. Not so.
Episode 28 : Rocket Island
August. 04,2009
It's an idyllic tropical atoll, but amid the coconut groves are billions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment. Mark Corcoran reveals a hitherto top-secret, Club Med style nuclear missile test range which "sees" everything that moves across a third of the globe and in deep space.
Episode 27 : The Uighur Dilemma
July. 28,2009
The Uighurs. Who are they and why is the Chinese government flattening vast tracts of their magnificent cultural capital, Kashgar? Is it for safety or to secure against separatists and potential terrorism?
Episode 26 : Us and Them
July. 21,2009
Kilometres of high concrete walls snake through Belfast in Northern Ireland - graffiti daubed and grim. They divide Catholic neighbourhoods from Protestant. They’re called the Peace Walls. But do they keep the enduring hatred and suspicion locked outside or inside?
Episode 25 : Orphans of the Storm
July. 14,2009
A perilous year undercover - ducking the authorities and informers and risking decades in jail – has resulted in an unforgettable Foreign Correspondent with a team of Burmese cameraman capturing the plight of a pitiful new cast of Burmese – The Orphans of the Storm.
Episode 24 : The Rebellion Network
July. 07,2009
It’s raw, it’s instant and it’s rocked authoritarian Iran and riveted world attention. It’s the phenomenal new-media broadcast by Iran’s angry, dissenting young that’s capturing a disturbing, perhaps defining collision of rebellion and repression. Digital dissent vs. bullets and batons - will the new technologies bring change in Iran?
Episode 23 : Bravo! Encore!
June. 30,2009
In a Venezuelan slum a young girl practices on her clarinet and dreams a big musical dream. On a stage in New York City an 80 year old clarinettist takes his final bow to rapturous applause. The two are worlds apart but joined by the profound, elevating forces of music.
Episode 22 : A Greek Tragedy
June. 23,2009
How did a 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, shot by a policeman in Athens six months ago become a cause celebre? Why was his name and the manner of his death invoked by students, anarchists and even terrorists as epitomising all that is wrong with the Greek government?
Episode 21 : The Bulldozer
June. 16,2009
Foreign Correspondent presenter and reporter Mark Corcoran, who has spent a decade observing the dangerous world of South Asian narco-politics, takes us on a journey through Afghanistan's dark political underbelly.
Episode 20 : Sumo Confidential
June. 09,2009
They're big men with even bigger secrets. The cloistered world of Sumo hides myriad rituals and traditions, bone-jarring training schedules even humiliating and painful punishment. As scandal rocks Japan's venerable sport, Foreign Correspondent opens the door on life inside a Sumo stable.
Episode 19 : One Night in Sofia
June. 02,2009
Every year thousands of young Australians pack their backpacks, book their EuRail passes and make for Europe, leaving their parents to worry and fret about their wellbeing and their ability to cope with foreign languages and customs. God forbid anything should happen to them.
Episode 18 : Detroit: Ain't Too Proud To Beg
May. 26,2009
It was big, it was shiny and it was brassy. Few things symbolised the wealth and optimism of a post-war America more than the big car and the Motown sound. And perhaps few things symbolise the decline of American capitalism more than the sight of the country’s biggest car makers going cap in hand to Washington begging for a bail out. General Motors has until June 1 to come up with a survival plan, or face bankruptcy.
Episode 17 : The Third Amigo
May. 19,2009
For more than four decades, tens of thousands of Colombians have been kidnapped or killed in South America’s longest-running civil war. Now Colombia’s hard-line president Alvaro Uribe insists it’s coming to an end. But will this country's most popular president ever, win the right to run for a third term in office? And at what cost to South America's oldest democracy?
Episode 16 : Cats in the Clouds
May. 06,2009
Very few have seen it in the wild but those who have say it’s the most beautiful of the big cats. The Snow Leopard prowls the roof of the world in dwindling numbers. Can it be saved?
Episode 15 : Pirateland
April. 28,2009
How and why did a bunch of illiterate, dirt poor Africans transform themselves from simple cray-fishermen into the fearsome, gun-toting gangs mugging giant, sophisticated shipping off the coast of Somalia and gouging multi-million dollar ransoms? Marauding foreign fishing fleets took their lobsters.
Episode 14 : The Young Guns
April. 21,2009
It’s turned out some fearsome warriors in the past but can America’s prestigious military academy West Point manufacture the brass that will ultimately prevail in what’s now being dubbed ‘Obama’s War’ – Afghanistan?
Episode 13 : Trapped in Terror
April. 15,2009
They were hiding for their lives, hunted by gunmen who’d brought India’s biggest city to a standstill. In this chilling ‘insider's’ account of a terrorist siege, two Australian business people tell of their remarkable survival trapped inside Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel, during the attacks last November.
Episode 12 : Jacob Zuma
April. 07,2009
He's in the fast lane to the top in South Africa but there’s powerful evidence the man following the trail blazed by Mandela has been on the take. Reporter Andrew Fowler investigates whether Jacob Zuma - the man most likely to become the next President of South Africa – took bribes from a French arms company.
Episode 11 : Children of Zanskar
April. 07,2009
When people in remote villages in Zanskar get sick, chances are they’ll turn to the “Oracle”. The Oracle is a faith healer who goes into a trance so a Tibetan spirit can take over and dispense medical advice. It’s all part of a complex system of folk healing that has spread to this isolated district in north-west India, from neighbouring Tibet.
Episode 10 : The Farmer Wants a Country
March. 31,2009
He’ll have you believe he’s a quiet goat farmer and a keen horseman who just happens to think he might make an ideal Indonesian President one day. But looks can be deceiving and there’s little doubt Prabowo Subianto’s pursuit of Indonesia’s top job will be ruthlessly efficient and purposeful.
Episode 9 : The Big Smoke
March. 24,2009
China’s exponential growth took Australia along for the white-knuckled ride. It fuelled our resources boom and had economic optimists forecasting decades of good times. How things change.
Episode 8 : Left To Die
March. 17,2009
Cholera is a preventable disease, yet there’s an epidemic raging in Zimbabwe. At least 4,000 are dead, and some 90,000 infected. Filming secretly and posing as tourists, reporter Andrew Geoghegan and producer Mary Ann Jolley uncover the true extent of the crisis.
Episode 7 : Is Aid Killing Africa?
March. 17,2009
Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian-born economist who says aid is killing Africa. In her new book, Dead Aid, she argues that official aid is easy money that fosters corruption and distorts economies, creating a culture of dependency and economic laziness.
Episode 6 : American Emergency
March. 11,2009
Washington correspondent Tracy Bowden uncovers one of the biggest killers in America - the US health system. Lack of insurance is now the third leading cause of death in the US, after cancer and heart disease.
Episode 5 : Young Lions of Lahore
March. 11,2009
South Asia correspondent Sally Sara with the cricket tragics of Lahore, as Pakistan is wiped from world cricket's tour map.
Episode 4 : What Lies Beneath?
March. 03,2009
In Antarctica the race is on for scientific supremacy and to find an ice-scientist’s Holy Grail … a 1,000,000-year-old ice core. It’s thought that’s where the secrets to understanding global warming have been snap frozen. And the best place to look – the vast Australian Antarctic Territory.
Episode 3 : Stolen and Sold
February. 24,2009
What would you do if you discovered your adopted children were stolen and trafficked, and not willingly given up by their parents, as you’d believed? South Asia correspondent Sally Sara investigates the insidious trade of children in India, and joins an Australian family in their moving search for the truth.
Episode 2 : The World According to Frost
February. 17,2009
For 50 years David Frost has shared the world’s stage with the powerful, rich and famous – and this week he shares it with Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Corcoran.
Episode 1 : Ramadan In Space
February. 17,2009
Which way is Mecca in space? Helen Vatsikopoulos ponders this and other imponderables when she meets Malaysia’s “it” man, the hunky former male model Dr Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, who’s become the country’s first astronaut.

Seasons

Season 33
Season 33 2024
Season 32
Season 32 2023
Season 31
Season 31 2022
Season 30
Season 30 2021
Season 29
Season 29 2020
Season 28
Season 28 2019
Season 27
Season 27 2018
Season 26
Season 26 2017
Season 25
Season 25 2016
Season 24
Season 24 2015
Season 23
Season 23 2014
Season 22
Season 22 2013
Season 21
Season 21 2012
Season 20
Season 20 2011
Season 18
Season 18 2010
Season 17
Season 17 2009
Season 5
Season 5 1996

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